Microsoft Teams will soon let you disable people’s video

Microsoft has spent the last year or so dramatically increasing the number of people that can be within a meeting at once. That’s great for when you need 49 people on your screen at once and everyone is well-behaved, but it isn’t great if someone’s video feed is distracting. Soon, you’ll be able to disable the video feed of people within Teams meetings.

Two features appear on the Microsoft 365 roadmap, one that describes the ability to disable and enable a single attendee’s video and another about disabling and enabling the video of all attendees.

Here are the descriptions of the features:

Microsoft Teams: Disable/Enable a Single Attendee’s Video

Ability to disable and enable a single attendee’s video in a Microsoft Teams meeting.

Microsoft Teams: Disable/Enable all Attendee’s Video

Ability to disable and enable video for all attendee’s before, or during, a Microsoft Teams meeting.

Hosts may want to disable someone’s video for a number of reasons, including someone accidentally showing something on video that they aren’t supposed to and someone’s video being distracting. It could be something as innocent as a webcam falling over and causing a distraction. Whatever the reason, hosts should soon be able to control which video feeds appear within a meeting.

The features are tagged for all major platforms, so it appears that they could come to Teams on a range of devices.

The descriptions don’t specifically mention hosts disabling the video feeds, but that’s likely the case. Otherwise, chaos could ensue of people disabling each other’s video.

The Microsoft 365 roadmap lists the features as coming in April 2021, but the roadmap is always subject to change. It is a guide for what features are on the way, not a set of hard deadlines for features to come out.